Old Dads
“Old Dads” boasts an excellent cast but it’s hardly a movie at all, which is too bad considering it’s Bill Burr’s directorial debut. Though best known as a comedian, talk show guest and podcaster, Burr has established himself as one of the great standups turned actors of his generation, consistently delivering performances in movies and TV shows that are more thoughtful than they needed to be sometimes considerably so and occasionally even flat out impressive, his work as Migs Mayfield, a former Imperial sharpshooter turned mercenary on “The Mandalorian,” was one of the highlights of that show, building to a dramatic climax that echoed Christoph Waltz’s final scene in “Django Unchained.”
Standup comics who direct themselves in projects they also wrote risk making something that feels like a long standup comedy routine awkwardly retrofitted with characters and a smidge of plot, lacking strong style and point of view beyond what would make it feel like nothing more than brand extension. “Old Dads,” about three middle-aged Los Angeles men who become fathers decades after giving up hope on the possibility, is that movie.
Like “F is for Family,” the animated Netflix series created by and starring Burr (and like much of his earlier standup before he aged out of griping and became more multifaceted), “Old Dads” is two-thirds a satire on “political correctness” a loaded term which in practice often amounts to not being able to say anything at any given moment without suffering consequences and one third meandering midlife crisis buddy movie wherein Burr’s character Jack Kelly finds himself drifting through life after selling the vintage sports jersey replica business he’d founded with his two best friends/biz partners (played by Bokeem Woodbine and Bobby Cannavale).
After the sale, the partners are retained as staff then forced to watch as everyone born before 1988 is fired (a potential age discrimination lawsuit goldmine that the movie, oddly, treats as a fait accompli), then goes full parody of 21st century tech bro new media cliches. The young wannabe-guru boss, Aspin Bell (Miles Robbins), inundates his elders with disruptor culture buzz phrases while building a cult of personality around himself. And as if all this wasn’t enough to drive combative and self-righteous Kelly into a frothing snit, he and his wife Linda (Kate Aselton) are having trouble with their son’s elite New Age private school because Kelly’s ’70s-rooted version of parenting keeps running afoul of the staff, administrators and other parents a gaggle of soft progressive yuppies who teach kids to put their emotions and sensitivities above all else.
In the “Old Dads” part of “political correctness” is like one of those TV specials that are made for political reactionaries and from which the “triggered” term originated, only watered-down and slightly more self aware. This could be any Los Angeles post millennium comedy. characters say inappropriate things at inopportune moments so we can have a cheap laugh, then bystander characters (often Linda) cover for the writers by saying you simply can’t do stuff like that while nudging us to feel that the world is cramping the politically incorrect character’s style. It’s a shame how coddled everyone has become, says “Old Dads.”
Jack gets into hot water at school early in the movie for being two minutes late to pick up his son, he incurs a fine and the principal chews him out, so he calls her the C-word. To show contrition, he has to help plan a fundraising party with his buddies (who also have kids at the school) and emcee its charity auction. Like most such material in “Old Dads,” Jack is depicted as basically decent but flawed, it suggests that anyone who had an issue with his outburst was hypersensitive and overreacting, also that his punishment was just part of a scheme to extract free labor from the parents. During this session, they’re asked to suggest a theme, another parent tweaks it so now they’ll have an all trans waitstaff, they don’t see why it’d be wrong to call them “trannys”; here too they’re reasonable or at least not bad.
Mostly “Old Dads” has stuff like this. It’s all like one of those standup bits that starts with “Don’t you hate it when,” then follows with some petty grievance where you can tell by listening that the comic is actually mad about something else entirely which makes him seem like the one who’s blowing things out of proportion. There’s a scene at a gym where the men lob gendered insults to hype each other up during weightlifting and there are cutaways to women in the gym looking aghast and annoyed, it’s all very much from the point of view of Jack and the fellas, just guys being guys in a feminized world.
The majority of the scenes are saved by Cannavale, who plays a father and husband that is constantly nagged by his wife until he finally submits. He thinks he is cool and young, he always comes up next to younger characters, talks to them using slang from ten years ago and tries acting like a “down” guy. Woodbine’s performance isn’t as good because the script never really thinks about why he’s having a midlife crisis over his much younger girlfriend getting pregnant. In the last third of the movie there’s a part where they go out on the town for one night while they’re all depressed and out of touch with reality, it wants to be gritty and real (like John Cassavetes’ “Husbands”), but doesn’t have the balls or knowhow to get there, though there is a funny bit with Kelly appearing lost in thought about how screwed up his life has gotten during a philosophical soliloquy when suddenly some young flesh enters the frame (he has paid for a lap dance) and it becomes clear that he hasn’t even been paying attention. This movie could have been so much more.
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